spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

the Holy Spirit. Moreover, this focus will have an effect on how we regard the world and the
fruits of human creativity. Following Sherry’s line of thinking, one could even say that this link
between the Holy Spirit and the notion of beauty offers a broader understanding of the healing
ways of God’s Spirit in creation. The Spirit is the One who reveals God’s glory and beauty in
this world, for “the Holy Spirit ís the beauty of God” (Venter 2010:189). This perspective has
been developed by Jonathan Edwards, who successfully embedded the theological concept of
beauty in a Trinitarian theology (see Sherry 2007:8; Venter 2010:187). The idea of a God who is
beauty (and that divine beauty is the archetype of earthly beauty) can also be found in the
writings of the Cappadocians, Augustine, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Yet the
attention for the involvement of the Spirit in the communication of God’s beauty to creation
provides a new avenue in the exploration of the relation between God and healing.
The Triune God is the source of all worldly beauty, which the Spirit communicates to the world.
This beauty may refer to notions like excellence, glory, symmetry, proportion, harmony, consent,
union, love and holiness (see Venter 2010:187), but even the motif of consent to creaturely being
might fit the profile of the beauty with which the Spirit includes creation in God’s glory and
perfection. The Spirit then draws vulnerable creaturely life to her beauty and perfection. Just as
the Spirit was present in the disfiguration as well as the transfiguration and beautification of
Christ’s body, so is the Spirit of God involved in the suffering as well as the beautification of
human bodies, and of all creaturely life. The Spirit’s mission of beautifying embodied life is
about the retrieval of the quality of life.
How is the Spirit able to retrieve the beauty of a vulnerable, suffering creaturely body? The idea
developed here is that the relation between beauty and the cross of Christ provides the
foundation of the Spirit’s beautifying mission of vulnerable life. Beauty is linked to the biblical
notion of God’s glory. This glory of God is revealed to us by Jesus Christ, and ultimately on the
cross. Viladesau (2008a:186) states that “for Christian faith, Christ — precisely on the cross —
is the supreme revelation of God’s being, God’s form, glory, and beauty”. In a sense one could
say that the ugliness of the cross, the utter denial of God’s glory and the destruction of Godgiven
life, reveals God’s love and the beauty and the perfection of life. One could also say that
the Spirit’s beautifying mission entails a redefinition of beauty, for the Spirit points towards
Christ as the One who became body, was wounded and rejected. Christ became sin, became
ugly, and died that way. He was resurrected with that mutilated body. Christ was glorified and
beautified in that same disabled body. The suggestion is that the Spirit of God does not obscure
or deny the wounds of his body, but rather redefines the quality of beauty: one cannot speak of
beauty without referring to the cross and the resurrection as the way in which God has revealed
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